It’s being reported London’s Mayor, Sadiq Khan, is spending £150 million on technology to charge people per mile for driving in London.

The Sunday Telegraph reported that “Project Detroit” is tasked with delivering a “more sophisticated… new core technology platform for road-user charging”.

It quotes a series of Freedom of Information requests showing 157 staff are now working solely on the scheme. It says in total £21 million has already been spent on the project, which started in 2021, but the “platform has an estimated final cost of between £130 million to £150 million”.

The report says Conservatives at City Hall claim Project Detroit, which is creating a single “road user charging” platform for the congestion charge, Ultra Low Emission Zone and Low Emission Zone, could be used to introduce a charge based on the distance driven in cars within London.

It quotes one FoI response from TfL saying: “The Detroit platform has the capability to be extended and we will be looking to build the system flexibly so that other forms of charging based on distance, vehicle type, etc could be catered for if a decision was made in future to do so.”

(Picture – Highways News)